Ten years of a ‘quiet culture war’: where does it stand now?

In 2014, I wrote ‘A quiet culture war in research libraries – and what it means for librarians, researchers and publishers’, arguing that there existed an ongoing conflict within the academic library profession over whether the library’s most important role is to support its local institution or to advance global priorities (specifically, progress towards open scholarship). Here I reassess the landscape ten years later, finding that this conflict has both persisted and deepened, and offer two predictions: first, that the broader systemic conflict between competing business models will not be resolved by libraries, authors or publishers, but rather by institutions and funders, and second, that the end result will be a system characterized by coexisting models of pay‑access and open‑access publishing.